


Aftermath

by Sangerin



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Eerie, Episode Related, Episode: s02e05, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-10-04
Updated: 2004-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/190072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sangerin/pseuds/Sangerin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The team in the aftermath of the EERIE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Zoe

When it was over, Zoe couldn't stop shaking.

She put down the gun, though she hardly realised she was doing it. She leant against a desk, and that was when she lost muscle control. For the first time she could remember, her knees really began to knock. She gripped the edge of the desk and her knuckles turned white. That desk  
was the only thing keeping her upright.

Harry hugged her. He held her close and there was no way he didn't notice how upset she was. Her elbows were thumping against her ribcage, and her breath was coming in shallow gasps. He held her until she was calmer - not calm, but calmer. Then he kissed her on her forehead and  
let her go.

She breathed deeply and slowed her pulse down. When she could stand, she pushed away from the desk and got out her phone. She felt desperate to get in touch with someone, anyone, who had been living a normal life over the past two days - someone who could reassure her that the world had not almost ended. That she had not held a gun, pointed at the head of a colleague.

She wandered away from the others, barely noticing that Tom was doing the same. Barely noticing that Sam had dissolved in tears, that Danny had moved quickly to the Scottish woman's side to comfort her. She spoke quickly, realising that there was nothing she could say. There  
was no way to explain why she was calling, out of the blue, early on a Saturday morning. No way to explain the quaver in her voice. She said goodbye and hung up.

Harry was at her side again, handing her a plastic cup of mid-range champagne. As she held it, the alcohol splashed up the sides. She held her wrist with her other hand to steady it, and smiled at Malcolm, who was still looking shell-shocked. He smiled back, his expression as fake as her own.

She could still see the gun in her hand: she was sure everyone else could, too.

* * *

They went to the George as Harry suggested. They filed in, dishevelled from their long day and night. Malcolm and Colin went straight to the bar. Ruth joined them, laughing and joking with them. Danny and Sam came in together, his arm around her shoulder.

Zoe chose a dark corner, tucking her hair behind her ears and sinking into a chair. The post-adrenaline let-down hit her, and hit her badly. Every bone in her body ached. She folded her arms on the table in front of her, and lay her head on top of them. She closed her eyes.

'Rough day?'

She sat up to see a woman, the blonde firefighter, standing in front of her with a pint of beer in each hand.

'Think this will help?' the firefighter asked, holding out one pint.

Zoe took it from her, nodding her thanks. The firefighter sat down in the chair opposite.

'Stephanie, right?' asked Zoe.

'Steph. And I'm not really a firefighter.'

'And you're not dead, either,' Zoe noted, pointlessly.

'It was all pretty stressful, yeah,' said Steph.

Zoe snorted. 'You knew it wasn't real. We were locked in there, for two days, with hardly any food or water...' She could feel her pulse speeding up again, and stopped.

Steph reached out a hand to cup Zoe's cheek. Her skin was cool against Zoe's flushed face, and her eyes were steady as she held Zoe's gaze. 'Zoe, you did really well. You all did,' she said softly.

Zoe pulled away. She sat back in her chair and reached forward for her beer. She took a sip, and then a gulp. She looked back at Steph, and saw her still watching with those steady eyes. 'Tell me you're not from the psych department.'

'I'm not one of Miranda's little minions,' she replied, firmly.

'Good,' said Zoe, sighing with relief. She drank more of her beer. A bowl full of chips arrived at the table, and Zoe picked up a handful, suddenly ravenous. The first few she didn't even bother with vinegar or sauce. Steph was watching her, amused.

'You had food, didn't you?' asked Zoe, her anger building once again, forcing its way through her exhaustion. 'Food and water and...' She was beginning to shake again. The amusement fled Steph's face as she jumped up to sit beside Zoe and hold on to her. She held Zoe until the  
shaking stopped, and then kept holding on. 'I should be able to cope with this, dammit,' muttered Zoe.

'You thought the world was ending,' said Steph.

'I thought you were dead,' said Zoe. 'And you were a person, and it was horrible, but you were still just a firefighter I didn't know.'

Again, she calmed herself. Training came in handy at times like these. Pulse, breathing, mind. Slow, calm, collected.

'You don't know me much better now,' said Steph.

'Right now, I don't care,' replied Zoe. And this time she was the one who lifted a hand to caress Steph's cheek.

* * *

While the rest of the team had a riotous time in the front bar, letting off steam and generally recovering in whatever way suited them best, Zoe and Steph stayed in the dark at the back. Midway through the afternoon, they left. Tom watched them go, his own eyes haunted by a decision Zoe could guess. But she did little more than wave in his general direction, towards where he sat between Malcolm and Ruth.

Ruth would cheer him up - of that, Zoe was certain. Like Danny would do for Sam. And Steph for Zoe.

Two hours later, Dot saw the warning on Ruth's screen.

Two and a half hours later, they were all back at the grid.


	2. Danny

From the moment the lights were restored, and he held Sam in his arms as she sobbed, there was only one place the day could end.

There were moments - many of them - when Danny was certain the day would end in a slow death from VX poisoning. He saw Paul Dunbarton at No. 10 growing pale and distracted, sweaty and disoriented. He saw the same thing happen to Harry and refused to see the connections. Then Tom quarantined Harry, and Danny was forced to admit it was real, and it was deadly.

Except it wasn't. They were all damn good actors. Danny was furious at Harry, grinning as though he'd won the lottery and popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. He was furious at the assessors, pouring in through the pods, chatting cheerfully to Ruth, who was the only one in a fit state to talk to anyone. And he was especially furious with the utter git in Edinburgh. To prevent himself from actually hitting out at Harry or the suits from GCHQ, Danny worked off some excess mental energy imagining what he'd do if he ever met that bloke in a back alley some dark night. And then that bloke - John Macleish; the bastard hadn't even really been in Edinburgh! - walked in through the pods, and all Danny could do was turn his head and concentrate on the woman still weeping in his arms.

This was a new side to Sam. She was all wide eyes and innocence when she wanted to be, but even Danny could see the ambition and drive that lay beneath. Puppy-dog eyes were only on the surface.

And only, he suspected, when she thought she was about to die.

But at that moment when Sam had looked up at him and said that she would only have gone on the barge because of him, something clicked. He looked at pretty, fluffy, Scottish Sam in an entirely different way. And from that moment, though they didn't realise it at the time, there was only one place that day would end. In bed.

Sex, for a spy, was a tricky thing. One more weapon in the arsenal; one more chink in the armour. And it wasn't something that you could leave at the office, either. Sex was sex, and it was hard to section it off to one corner of the brain.

Sometimes you had to sleep with someone on an op. Sometimes it was a last option, the one thing that would trigger the required trust for the op to continue. Sometimes you wanted to sleep with someone, but you couldn't. And in either case, and after the situations you'd never considered, you had to come home and face your real life. It was far easier not to have a real life.

It was one of the reasons that he and Helen had never gone anywhere: that and the fact that Helen worshipped the ground Tom walked on. Danny was used to that. Half the girls in Thames House would have been mad with jealousy had they known Helen got to pretend to be Tom's wife. In any case, Danny didn't want the entanglement. He didn't want to come off an op and have to face a girlfriend he'd technically cheated on. It was simpler this way. Pick a girl up, have some fun, and at the end, you go your separate ways. You find out a little about her, and what little she finds out about you is a legend, anyway. If there was one thing Ian Fleming had got right in his books, it was that. It was easier not to keep a romance going for long. Or perhaps to make sure that it wasn't a romance at all. Sex for a spy was a tricky thing. Sometimes it was better that sex was just sex.

Words by which Danny had always been proud to live.

* * *

They were all in shock. They demonstrated it in different ways, but they were all reacting to their soaring adrenaline levels, the rapid firing of neurons, and the major adjustments their brains had been making over the past twenty-four hours. It was an exercise. It was real. It was deadly, it was the end. It was an exercise.

Each time he let go of Sam he saw the disorientation in her eyes. The steel was gone and the puppy-dog look was real. So when they walked into the George, behind Ruth and Colin and Malcolm, behind Zoe and Harry and all the people from GCHQ who had played parts and observed, Danny still had an arm around Sam's shoulder. He led her to a seat and fetched her a drink.

Tom came in behind them, even more silent than usual. He sat at a nearby table and nursed a beer. He barely spoke, even when Harry - annoyingly upbeat about the entire exercise - tried to speak to him. Danny felt obliged to cover, and engaged Harry in conversation about Crystal Palace and Arsenal. Harry didn't really follow football.

Danny wanted to talk about anything but the exercise. Ruth, Colin and Malcolm rejoined their little group, and they ended up talking about the weather. Colin mentioned the booze barge. He'd missed the one he'd planned to go on, but now there was general agreement that it was a good idea. If enough people could get the same day off at once... the conversation drifted into detailed planning. Beside him, Danny felt Sam shrinking further into herself.

Zoe had hidden herself in a dark corner of the pub. The firefighter was with her, and they left together. Zoe raised her hand briefly and waved in Danny's general direction as she slipped out the door. Sam raised her hand to wave back, and Danny saw a wan smile play on Sam's lips.

'And good luck to her,' murmured Sam. When Sam lowered her hand, she placed it on Danny's leg. He hid a splutter and then a grin in his pint.

And suddenly he realised that it had been obvious all along.

Sex was just sex and they were all in shock. And there really was only one place this day was going to end.


	3. Tom

He wasn't in the mood for celebration.

He'd just broken up with another girlfriend. He'd just survived the end of the world. He'd just been deceived by his boss. He'd just pointed a gun at a colleague. He'd just pulled the bloody trigger.

He wasn't in the mood for champagne.

Harry clearly was in the mood for champagne, so Tom shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. He stared into the space ahead of him, while Harry plied the evaluation team with drinks. They toasted the group with cheap champagne in plastic cups while Tom glowered.

The rage that boiled up while he was on the phone to Vicki began to force its way to the surface again as he watched the celebrations. The world was falling apart and she was sitting there with her salmon. A VX bomb could explode in Whitehall and they would still be here, with their drinks and their empty assurances that 'yes, you all did remarkably well. Stood up under that pressure: good show.'

Had none of them heard of the boy who cried wolf?

* * *

At the George, the conversation flowed around him. Someone put a pint down in front of him: someone else offered him a smoke. People were doing things today they'd never done before. Things they'd sworn they'd never do again. Because today was different.

Today didn't count. It didn't count because it wasn't real. And if it didn't count, then you could do whatever the hell you wanted and it wouldn't matter. Lie to your colleagues - tell the truth - end a relationship - end the world. None of it would matter, or count, or even happen.

He prided himself on his clearheadedness. On being able to deal with anything without letting it phase him. He was a spy and that was the job. At the moment, though, he was anything but clearheaded. His mind was a fog of flashing images from the past twenty hours, always finishing with the movement of finger muscles as he pulled the trigger. Each time he tried to get past it, his thoughts led him back: Zoe's gun, shaking in the corner of his vision. His own, none so steady. Mark Wooley's sweaty red face, determined to leave. The utter certainty in his own mind that a slow, painful death lay beyond the pods. And the moment when his brain said 'you must' and he pressed his index finger back towards the trigger. And shot.

Around him, people talked about other things. The images didn't seem to bother the others. Danny talked idiotically about football with Harry, who wasn't at all interested. Zoe's voice, bitter and tense, slid under the hubbub from the dark corner where she had hidden herself. Ruth's laugh grated across his ears. Here and there, snatches of conversation would penetrate the haze that hung around his head. But mostly Tom's mind was filled with nonsense.

 _End of the world. End of the world. End of the world._

Nonsense.

Outside the windows the sun struggled through the clouds. People went about their daily business. Other George regulars wandered through the doors - looking curiously at the group of overly-happy people drinking in the middle of the day. The world hadn't ended.

The firefighter Tom condemned to death was still alive, sitting there with Zoe and a bowl of chips. Harry wasn't dead, and nor was Paul Dunbarton. The world was still intact, and MI-5 still had a job to do.

Pure dumb hate or pure dumb trust. That was what he had from the rest of his team, the team he would have to work with again tomorrow. The team he would have to work with if something really happened. The team who had seen him pull a gun and shoot.

Pure dumb hate. Malcolm and Colin. Probably Sam, and poor Dot down at the switchboard.

Pure dumb trust. Zoe and Ruth and Danny. He didn't know what he'd done to deserve their trust. Zoe stood there trembling, a gun in her hand. Danny did everything he was told and never questioned him once. And Ruth. There the whole time - the only person to whom he could be completely open. Even now he could feel her gaze on him, making sure of him.

He paused in his thoughts as he watched Zoe leave the pub, with a shy wave in his direction. He lifted a hand to wave back, but Sam waved and one was enough. The firefighter, Steph, whose blond-haired blue-eyed face Tom knew he would be seeing in his nightmares, followed Zoe. Across from him, Ruth smothered a chuckle and raised her eyebrows as she watched the door swing shut.

A little while later, Danny and Sam left together. Even through the haze, even through the natural subterfuge of a spy among spies, Tom could see the looks and touches between them. He silently wished his friend a good afternoon. Desperate, meaningless sex was what Danny probably needed right now. Zoe, too.

Tom, too, if he wanted it. Ruth offered. Not in words, never openly. But the possibility was in every concerned glace in his direction, in every brush of her arm against his.

He wasn't about to take her up on the offer. She was sweet, and didn't deserve to deal with him when he was like this. No one did. They were better without him: Ellie and Vicki and Helen and Ruth. He was better with them - with someone. But he'd wreaked Ellie's life already, and probably Vicki's. And Helen: keen and happy and so engagingly full of life. And then so horribly not. And he wasn't about to visit any of that on Ruth.

Finally he felt he'd stayed as long as he could. Dot had returned to her switchboard: Brigit and Mark and Harry and the rest of the team had gone back to write up the evaluations. Malcolm and Colin had settled in for the rest of the afternoon.

He avoided Ruth's scrutiny as he stood up. 'I'm off,' he said shortly. 'I'll see you tomorrow.'

He got to the end of the street before Dot's flash message hit his pager. He turned around and went back to Thames House. And he thought of the boy who cried wolf.


End file.
